Trump Fires Goldstein Amid State Dept. Purge

President also cutting through isolation by staff

Steve Goldstein, the State Dept. official who publicly disputed the terms of Rex Tillerson’s firing, was summarily fired by President Trump as part of his “spring cleaning” of the State Dept.

Goldstein received notice of his dismissal by phone not long after he fed ammunition to the media by challenging the reasoning behind Tillerson’s termination, claiming the departing secretary of state was “unaware of the reason” for his firing.

“Goldstein had also told reporters that Tillerson learned of his firing Tuesday morning from Trump’s tweet announcing he was nominating CIA chief Mike Pompeo to lead the State Department, while the White House claimed that [Chief of Staff] John Kelly had notified Tillerson on Friday evening,” reported Zero Hedge.

This poses an interesting question: Did Kelly actually tell Tillerson on Friday, as he was expected to?

That said, it shouldn’t be that surprising to Tillerson why he was fired because he was rarely on the same page as Trump when it came to foreign relations and national security issues.

Accordingly, Goldstein was fired partly because he was more loyal to Tillerson than anyone else, which explains why he practically attacked the White House over Tillerson’s firing.

On a related note, President Trump has taken a more active role in running the day-to-day affairs of the White House by grabbing the reins at times from Kelly.

Trump is preventing himself from being isolated by his own staff, a real danger given how Kelly and others have acted as gatekeepers by preventing information from flowing to the president.

“It used to be, according to what we’ve been told, the Oval Office door was open and you could walk in with anything you found anywhere on the internet and give it to Trump, and he’d take it for what it was and react to it,” said radio host Rush Limbaugh. “But the new chief of staff put limits on who is able to get in there.”

This isolation poses a great danger to the president as it removes him from his base whose voices are largely ignored by the mainstream media.